Dressed in a fitted black cocktail dress and a beautiful sculpted hat, singer Candice Alley, 27, looked so svelte and stunning at this year’s Melbourne Cup Day races, you’d never know she’d given birth to twins just eight weeks before.

“She looks fantastic, doesn’t she?” husband Grant Hackett, 29, said during a catch-up at the exclusive track-side Emirates tent at Flemington. “She’s back to the size she was before she had the babies.”

Grant credits Candice’s weight-loss with sensible, healthy eating and says he’s proud of the way she’s bounced back after the birth of Jagger and Charlize in September.

During the pregnancy, petite Candice almost doubled in size and, at the time, both she and her swimming champ husband were a little in awe of her changing shape.

“My wife’s only five foot four [162cm], so she’s absolutely gigantic at the moment,” he told Woman’s Day a week before the birth. “Her stomach is so big – it’s almost square.”

“My stomach was like a cube shape,” Candice agrees. “Grant could literally rest his keys on my tummy.”

But in no time at all, the new mum has shrunk back to her normal size and is looking better than ever. “Candice looks lovely,” says dietitian Geraldine Georgeou from Designer Diets. “I would say she would have lost, post-natally, about 15 kilos.

“It looks like she probably lost about 10 kilos when the babies came out, and then maybe another five kilos after that. But it looks like her BMI [Body Mass Indicator] would be on the lower end of normal, so around 18 or 19 looking at her.”